This morning President Obama released his long awaited 2010 Budget Blueprint, and when it comes to sex education, I’m afraid that we have more questions than concrete answers.

First, the only language in the Health and Human Services section that
refers to sex education comes under a paragraph about preventing teen
pregnancy:

Prevents Teen Pregnancy. The Budget supports
State, community-based, and faith-based efforts to reduce teen
pregnancy using evidence based models. The program will fund models
that stress the importance of abstinence while providing
medically-accurate and age-appropriate information to youth who have
already become sexually active.

So the language raises a couple of questions: The budget
says that they will provide "medically-accurate and age-appropriate
information to youth who have already become sexually active."
Does this mean that those who haven’t had sex yet don’t get this sex
education? How will "sexually active youth" be identified? Or what
assumptions will go into deciding who receives these lessons?

Are the "model" programs that "stress the importance of abstinence" also required to provide the "medically-accurate and age-appropriate" components? Or are those "model" programs stressing abstinence the same "faith based efforts" that the previous Administration funded?

Will we see a parallel stream of funding that allows those ineffective,
harmful abstinence-only programs that are rooted in simply telling kids
that it is dangerous and immoral to have sex before marriage, while
ignoring or misleading youth on the effectiveness of contraception?

And perhaps most concerning, there is no reference to "comprehensive sex education."

President Obama has already publicly stated his support for
age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education for all students, and has
also vowed in his inaugural address and address to the joint session of
Congress on Tuesday that he would stop funding education programs that
don’t work. From these statements, one would assume that we were in
great shape – – that Obama would eliminate federal funding for these
abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that have already wasted more
than $1.5 billion and put the sexual health of countless youth in jeopardy.

We don’t have any concrete numbers yet, but we need to keep writing
President Obama to make sure that he hears from those of us who support
science-based, reality-based sex education..

It’s not too late for Obama to cut this funding in his detailed budget
that will likely come out next month, so, for the sake of the sexual
health of young people for an entire generation, let him know how you feel!